No changes on the menu at award winning restaurant

His eatery in remote South Africa has won renown as the world’s first Restaurant of the Year, but chef Kobus van der Merwe insists fame will change nothing.

"When I saw the other nominees in that list I actually had a giggle, because I thought we were so out of our league," smiled Van der Merwe, 38, who did not begin to cook seriously until he was 30.

Unlike many competitors at last week’s inaugural World Restaurant Awards, a seven-course tasting menu at Wolfgat costs about R830 — a fraction of what you’d pay at a top Paris table.

Van der Merwe also forages every day for ingredients on the wild Atlantic shore near his restaurant at Paternoster, and makes his own bread and butter.

"I checked my emails and I was like, OK — there’s actually an official communication letting us know we have been nominated.

So, we had like no clue, absolutely no clue," said Van der Merwe.

Entrance to the Wolfgat restaurant in Paternoster. Picture by Sumaya Hisham for Reuters.

The restaurant’s humble setting in the Western Cape, and Van der Merwe’s belief in sustainable, back-to-basics cooking, won the hearts of judges in the French capital, who named it Restaurant of the Year.

The former journalist, who can feed only 20 people at a sitting, told AFP: "We were all sort of finding our feet at the beginning." – ‘Not going to change anything’ – "I was in that tiny little kitchen doing all the cooking and we were all serving so we sort of figured it out together," he said wearing a pristine white shirt and black apron alongside a long beard and curly hair.

But the award "is not going to change anything about the scale that Wolfgat operates on," he said.

"The scale that we do (is) sustainable — and that’s what works for us," he said.